Patchwork Heart (Part 2)
Title: Patchwork Heart
Pairing: Leslie/Ben (AU)
Word Count: ~5,100 (this part)
Rating: R? (Let's say R, there is a huge amount of swearing in this, and also sexual imagery)
Timeline: Highschool Alt!Universe (yeah you read that right)
Warnings: Um, they're recently acquired step-siblings, so you know that could be a little squicky (idek)
A/N: Yeah okay so this is still happening (I've decided I'm done apologizing for it), but before I get like twenty comments about Snapshots, I have significant plane and hotel room time next week all of which I plan to devote to cranking out the last part of that. Just give me a little bit of recovery from writing the previous part (because as much emotional hell as I put you guys through, I live with that for every day that I'm working on a part like that). So anyway on with this.
Part 1
Leslie’s warnings about Lindsay turn out to be kind of prophetic. Or maybe it’s just him, maybe he’s just so screwed up these days he can’t have a normal interaction with a girl who isn’t you know kind of related to him.
Regardless, he was never going to have a normal interaction with Lindsay Carlisle-Shay.
She obviously feels he’s beneath her, like she’s slumming it in some way, and seems to be taking great pleasure in deliberately being unable to remember his name. Seriously she calls him Dan like half the time.
And somehow they still wind up bringing each other off in one of the hotel bathrooms.
It’s angry and vicious, and she keeps calling him the wrong name, like that’s what she’s getting off on. That he knows he’s not really that important to her. And he wants to tell her to shut-up because her voice keeps distracting him from being able to pretend he’s not with her either. And when she reaches down to fumble with his zipper, and slip her hand into his pants, he puts his over her mouth just to keep her from talking for like five seconds.
She bites his fingers.
He attaches his mouth to side of her neck, high enough where she’ll never be able to cover the hickey, where everyone will know what she let him do. Runs his hand up the slit of her dress, and fingers her through the scrap of lace she’s wearing as underwear, taking a kind of perverse reciprocal pleasure in forcing her to finally say his name correctly before he brings her off.
When it’s done he feels dirty and hollow and like the worst kind of heel.
They pretty much ignore each other the rest of the night.
Still somehow he kind of thinks this isn’t going to be the last time this happens.
Because okay, maybe Lindsay is toxic. Maybe she’s a completely terrible person.
But Ben’s not really sure he deserves anything better.
Not when he was picturing Leslie in that blue dress the entire time.
---
When he gets home that night, he sneaks around the back because while he’s not past curfew or anything, he kind of doesn’t want to Leslie to see him right now, not when he’s pretty sure he’s got a few scratch marks on the back of his neck and a hickey just under his collar from someone she so obviously hates.
And yeah that’s probably a small part of the attraction of Lindsay. That she is decidedly not Leslie. That she’s like the anti-Leslie. Like if Leslie found out it would probably hurt her and maybe it would be good to know that him being with someone could hurt her in some way. Even if it’s for all the wrong reasons.
And maybe he’s a fucking asshole with serious issues.
Either way, the whole sneaking in to avoid Leslie thing winds up backfiring spectacularly.
She’s sitting in the backyard on her old childhood swingset, idly twisting this way and that. She’s still in her prom dress and there’s a break in the trees that seems to kind of spotlight her in the moonlight, and damn if the effect isn’t absolutely heart-stopping.
Which is probably why he quite literally stops. Dead in his tracks, holding his shoes in his hands like an idiot.
Leslie looks up and gives him an oddly sad smile. “Hey.”
“Umm, hey,” he blinks, bringing his hand to the back of his neck self-consciously. “You’re, um, back kind of early.”
“Yeah,” she exhales, droops, and she looks so impossibly fragile in that moment, like spun glass, sparkling and beautiful and far too delicate, that he just wants to hold her in his hands, protect her from the entire world.
Without really knowing what he’s doing or why he’s doing it, Ben walks over to stand behind her, hands coming to rest on the chain just above hers.
“Everything okay?”
She gives a kind of half-shrug that very clearly says no everything is not okay, but she’s not sure she wants to talk about it, at least not with him. Because he doesn’t know what to do for her, but he doesn’t know how to leave her like this either, he just gives her a tiny push, sending her forward and bringing her back to him.
Repeats it.
They just do that for a few minutes. She doesn’t actually ‘swing’ really. At least not the way he imagines Leslie must, throwing her whole body into it, pumping herself higher and higher in a giddy pendulum that makes you think she might take off at any minute. Instead she just kind of sits there, spent and tired, letting him do all the work, and every time she comes back to him he holds onto the chain a beat too long, interrupting the momentum, keeping her with him.
Finally on one of backswings, she moves her hands up to cover his, in a silent ‘stop’, and tilts her head back to look at him.
“I broke up with Mark tonight.”
That is about the last thing he expected to hear out of her mouth, because really the guy kind of screws with her head and Ben had pretty much resigned himself to the fact that it was going to take Mark breaking Leslie’s heart to get her out of that (either that or Ben committing some kind of heretofore undetermined felony, which you know he hadn’t entirely ruled out yet). And even if none of that were true, well Leslie is the kind of person who would just go out of her way not to do something like that to someone on their prom night.
So yeah complete and utter shock is about the only explanation he has for the fact his fingers automatically tangle up with hers around the chains of the swing, but Leslie doesn’t seem to mind, just tangles her fingers back and smiles that sad, heartbreaking smile that says she knows it’s going to be okay eventually, but right now everything just really sucks.
Finally he finds his voice, “So, um, what happened?”
Leslie looks away, digs the heel of her shoe into the dirt, “It’s kind of embarrassing to talk about. I mean you know like it might be weird.”
And she gives weird this significant emphasis, that immediately makes his brain go back to walking in on her and Mark and pronouncing it ‘weird’, and-
Shit.
He does not need to know this. But at the same time Ben can feel something insistent and black pounding at the back of his head, and he like three seconds from going over to Mark’s house and getting in at least one good punch before he gets put into traction, and he just- he can’t not know.
“Did he-? I mean he didn’t-?”
Yeah there is absolutely no way he’s going to be figuring out how to finish that sentence anytime soon.
Leslie shakes her head, “No, but I think we were going to, you know? Like I know he wanted to and I’d been thinking about it, about letting him-”
She doesn’t continue, but Ben knows what ‘letting him’ is referring to, every teenage guy in whole entire world knows what it means when a girl will ‘let you’ on the night of the prom. And surprisingly, even as he’s squeezing his eyes shut in an effort not to think about it, like at all, something weird happens. He’s not immediately assaulted with images of the things Leslie might have let Mark do or some kind of knife-blade jealously (though he can feel that lingering somewhere in the corner waiting to pounce), or really anything related to things Mark might have gotten that he’s totally forbidden.
Instead what overwhelms him, washes over him in a torrent so powerful that it pretty much obliterates everything else is just sadness. Complete, soul-crushing sadness at the idea that Leslie would ever think she should ‘let’ any guy do anything, that she needed to ‘let’ a guy do anything, that any guy shouldn’t be ecstatic to just, you know, be around her.
That some guy wouldn’t simply stand here with her in the moonlight, hands tangled up with hers on the chains of a swing-set and feel like his whole existence hinged on nothing more than being able to extend this moment as long as possible.
“Ben?” Leslie tugs a little on the chains, drawing his attention, “Ben? Oh, I grossed you out, didn’t I? Sorry.”
He shakes his head trying to clear it, wipe the slate clean. Finally, finds his voice. “No, no it’s okay. So you didn’t- No you just said you didn’t. So what stopped you from- ? Oh god, am I allowed to ask that?”
Leslie rolls her eyes, in her patented ‘sometimes you are so awkward it is completely painful to talk to you’, look, then squinches her face up in a glare. “You did.”
Wha-?
“You and everything you said about Mark and your stupid apology for everything you said about Mark. And you’re right okay? He doesn’t really talk to me and he doesn’t make me feel like I can conquer the world and whatever else it is you said a guy should do. And ugh,” She drops her head back against his hipbone, face stormy now, “This is all your fault, you know. I just wanted to have a nice fun night and instead I couldn’t stop thinking about everything you said and how Mark wasn’t any of it. And he noticed and we got into this big fight about why do I care what you think and I kept telling him that wasn’t the point at all. And you just- you ruined my prom.”
Yeah he should probably be apologizing or something, but honestly . . . Ben has never felt more awesome in his entire life.
She narrows her eyes. “Stop smiling.” Rattles the chains underneath his hands, “Seriously stop it. You’re not supposed to be happy about this. You’re supposed to be contrite and making it up to me.”
But her eyes are maybe kind of smiling, too. And he thinks maybe deep down she knows that if things had gone the other way it would have been ten-times worse, and yeah, she’s gonna be fine.
Still he does feel pretty bad that Leslie didn’t get the night she wanted, because Ben just wants to give her everything she wants, forever, and honestly his whole prom experience was nothing to write home about. Except for one very particular instance that he’s never going to write home about. And he doesn’t want that to be how he remembers this night and he can still hear Leslie’s pleading ‘Come with me, instead’ in his mind.
And ‘yeah,’ he thinks, ‘yeah Leslie, come with me, instead. It was awful because we were apart, because we should have been together and we both knew it. So come with me instead and it will be amazing.’
But of course he doesn’t say that, doesn’t say any of it, just untangles his hands from Leslie’s and puts hers deliberately back on the chains with a quiet “Wait here.”
Leslie doesn’t say anything, simply looks up at him with wide trusting eyes, and an excited little-girl smile that says she knows he has an idea, and she believes in him enough to be patient and wait (and really if you’ve ever tried to get Leslie to be patient about anything you know this level of trust is like one step away from knighthood, from being declared her champion or something).
So Ben puts his shoes on the ground and sneaks into the house barefoot, to brave the sleeping dragon of their parents (sometimes there are serious advantages to being the responsible children), and go questing for something appropriately alcoholic and festive that will still satisfy Leslie’s sweet tooth (because even he knows it is not a successful prom after-party without booze). Finally he settles on the half full bottle of rum they keep on the back top shelf for cooking (again ridiculously responsible kids here), grabs a couple of cans of soda out of the fridge, and tosses them all in a bag. Goes to head back outside and then pauses, contemplating.
Fuck it.
Turning on his heel he makes his way upstairs and invades Leslie’s room, grabbing her tiara from the spot where it always hangs off her lampshade
If he’s gonna be a knight tonight, he damn well needs a queen.
---
When he gets back outside, Leslie’s eyes immediately fix on his relieved and excited and maybe a little bit fearful, like he really did just go off to fight a dragon for her and she’s been waiting on the edge of her seat to see if he returned safely.
Without a word, Ben walks over to stand in front of her, sets the tiara on her head with all the import and solemnity of a real coronation. And in a way it kind of feels like it, like he’s giving her back her power, returning Queen Leslie, confident, kickass, tiara-wearing scourge of black-hearted step-brothers everywhere to her rightful place. And okay maybe this metaphor/fantasy is getting a little out of control, but Leslie lifts her hands to touch the cheap rhinestones with a smile so bright it makes him feel like he’s given her diamonds, and he honestly doesn’t give a damn.
He grabs the sack of rum and cokes off the ground and jingles his car keys.
“Come with me.”
“Where?”
“Wherever you want.”
---
Where Leslie wants turns out to be only half a mile away at the Ramsett Park playground. And Ben would tell you he was surprised by this, except honestly, he’s kind of not. Thinks it’s kind of perfect actually.
In a playground everything is uncomplicated, and happiness is as simple as a set of monkey-bars or a see-saw. In a playground everything is pretend and anything can be what you want it to be. In a playground the rules are made up as you go along and the only ‘can’t’s are the ones you choose.
So yeah, if Ben Wyatt wants to take Leslie Knope to a prom of their very own?
Well if it could happen anywhere, it could happen in a playground.
The alcohol is forgotten almost immediately for the simple, dizzy pleasure of the merry-go-round. Leslie tries to get it going herself, but the shoes she’s wearing aren’t conducive to this, so Ben stands her up on the platform and tells her to hold on and runs. Keeps running and slipping and running some more. Round and round until he’s got it going as fast as he possibly can and Leslie’s laughing and screaming in delight and yelling ‘Get on Ben. Get on,’ and finally he scrambles onto the other side to keep it balanced.
And they go.
They go spinning so fast it feels like they might fly off the world, and Ben’s crouched down and holding on with both hands, but Leslie, amazing, confident, do-anything Leslie is still standing upright, thighs braced against either bar for balance, and damn if she doesn’t look less like a queen and more like some terribly wonderful, all-powerful goddess at that moment.
Either way when everything finally slows down and the world stops spinning and they’re both laughing and out of breath and leaning back against the middle pole for support, and Ben is just starting to think he probably shouldn’t repeat that or he might wind up breaking his neck, Leslie looks down at him with bright, gleeful eyes and whispers “Let’s do it again” and it doesn’t matter if she’s a deity or a queen or simply Leslie who lives down the hall, he’s powerless to refuse.
---
They don’t actually get around to the alcoholic part of the festivities until maybe two or three in the morning. After they’ve exhausted nearly every option the playground has, decimated their clothing climbing up rope ladders, and playing on the see-saws and racing the swings. Until they’re tired and happy and everything that happened before they came here seems long ago and far away.
But you know, they’re still teenagers and it’s still their prom-night, and he’s pretty sure that there’s a rule somewhere in the adolescent handbook that says if you are able to somehow acquire alcohol on the night of your prom you must consume said alcohol. And he and Leslie are nothing if not devoted followers of all rules, guidelines, bylaws etc.
So they sit up on the platform at the top of the slide, legs dangling over the edge, passing the rum bottle back and forth to pour it into their now only mildly cold cans of coke.
It doesn’t matter that much, they’re really mostly going through the motions because it gives them an excuse to sit together in the moonlight and talk about things with a fraction more honesty than you’re allowed sober.
And maybe Ben’s doing it because the platform is small and Leslie’s pressed right up against his side, thigh to thigh, hip to hip, shoulder to shoulder and he is for once just letting himself enjoy the sensation of being this close to her and it must be the intoxication keeping the guilt at bay.
Leslie sighs contentedly and drops her head to his shoulder, causing her tiara to skew at a dangerous angle. Idly, Ben rescues it before it can plunge to the ground, hands it over to her.
She takes it and sets it to the side, with a quiet, “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.” He whispers back, trying to make her understand that he knows this isn’t about saving twenty-five dollars worth of rhinestones at all.
“I’m sorry I made you walk home from the flower shop last week. And I’m sorry you got lost doing it.”
Ben chuckles under his breath a little, because now that he’s not, you know, actually in the middle of it, the memory of discovering first hand Pawnee has an actual gay bar when he stumbled in to the Bulge to ask for directions, is honestly kind of funny.
“Yeah well, I’m choosing to think of it like a tour. Besides, I probably kind of deserved it.”
“You didn’t.” She says lifting her head and trying to kind of half turn to look at him, as she does. But it really is tight up here so the effect is that her face is suddenly very close to his, and for a split-second, just a split-second he lets himself wonder what she would do if he kissed her right now, like momentarily indulge the notion that she might give him some other response than pushing him down the slide head first.
Turns his head away, and gulps down a couple of quick swallows of his rum and coke, because he is still way too sober to have an excuse for these thoughts. Lets himself feel the slight burn of it down his esophagus that tells him it’s now officially reached the point where it’s more rum than coke, takes another hit, and then hisses and shakes his head, “Really, let’s just forget about it.”
But once Leslie has decided to do something, nothing is going to stop her, and apparently right now she has decided to apologize whether he wants her to or not.
“I know you wouldn’t have said what you did about Mark if I hadn’t gotten so upset about Lindsay.”
At the mention of Lindsay’s name Ben turns his head away because he can still feel the other girl’s nails on the back of his neck, and her teeth on his fingers as her hand worked him to meaningless completion and he just- he can’t be remembering that and still keep looking at Leslie. He feels like he’s betrayed her in some fundamental way and he doesn’t even know if it’s what he did or why he did it or the fact that he’s still not entirely certain he won’t wind up doing it again.
This entire time Leslie keeps talking, keeps explaining like she’s the one in the wrong here, “I just- I know what she’s like and I don’t know, the thought that you actually liked her it just-”
And Ben hasn’t really been registering what she was saying until she abruptly breaks off, and he’s about to turn around to give her some non-committal response about how it’s not a big deal, when he feels her fingertips at the back of his neck, and for second his brain short-circuits.
“Oh.” She says it with a quiet disappointment, as her nail traces the edge of something and he realizes she’s not so much touching him as examining someone else’s handiwork.
Without thinking his hand flies up to stop her, gripping her fingers too-hard. “Leslie-”
She jerks away. “No, don’t. I, um, I don’t- I guess I just assumed that you and she didn’t- Which is like totally stupid because you didn’t say anything about how your night was. But I guess it was better mine.”
The last few words come out twisted, ugly and scathing and nothing like the Leslie he knows.
And he wants to tell her it wasn’t, wants to tell her it wasn’t like that at all, that it was awful and meaningless, and so incredibly not about Lindsay it’s not even funny, But he kind of thinks that would just make her more upset. Like she could get past him actually liking someone she despised, but using them, using anyone like that, even Lindsay Carlisle-Shay, . . . that’s just something Leslie would never forgive.
The fact that Lindsay was definitely using him too, is completely unimportant, Leslie already hates her and he thinks it’s things like this that are part of the reason.
So instead he just drops his head to his hand, and mutters, “Leslie, just let it go.”
And there must be something in his voice or his body language, something that warns her off, turns her back, some that says she’s about to go off the map of their relationship into dangerous uncharted territory and ‘here there be monsters,’ because for the first time since he met her, Leslie backs down.
Still it’s not the same after that. There’s a weird angry tension in the air. And he knows Leslie’s pissed at him for “liking” Lindsay or whatever it is he’s going to decide to call it, and he’s pissed at her for acting like she should get some kind of say in this, and he’s pissed at himself because there’s a part of him that wanted this to happen, wanted her to know just to see what it did to her, and really how stupidly self-destructive can he get?
But he’s also pissed at her because now that it has happened he honestly can’t figure out whether her whole issue is more about him being a with a girl or about it being Lindsay, but he’s pretty sure it’s the later when he wants it to be the former.
Finally because he just can’t stand it anymore, he finishes off the remaining contents of his soda can (which is now almost entirely rum), climbs down off the tower, and gathers things up.
Grabs his car keys and start to head over to where he’d parked not even stopping to make sure Leslie is following.
“Ben.”
He turns on his heel to glare at her, “What?”
“You can’t drive.”
Dammit not this again. “Look I’m not apologizing to you about this and I’m not letting you strand me here, too. I shouldn’t have said anything about Mark okay. But that doesn’t mean you get to have some kind of say over who I date now. I’ll do or not do whatever I want with Lindsay, and you want to tell me all about what a terrible person she is, fine. But don’t act like you have a right to be angry at me about this because you don’t, you’re not my-”
He breaks off just in time, bites down hard on the word ‘girlfriend’ before it can spill from his lips. Takes a shaky breath.
Except Leslie’s pissed now, crosses her arms over her chest to glare at him, “What? I’m not your what?”
“Nothing. You’re just my step-sister, okay? That’s it, just my step-sister.”
And maybe it comes out a little harder and more bitter than it should, because fuck if that doesn’t hurt to say. But that’s his issue not hers, so he doesn’t really understand why Leslie is standing there staring at him like he’s slapped her.
“I thought we were more than that. I thought-”
“What? What did you think we were? Because honestly, sometimes I don’t know.”
Shit, did he really just say that? How much of that rum did he have?
Still Leslie doesn’t immediately recoil or freak out or anything, instead she just looks at him and it feels like they’re so close to something, like if only he could reach out, he’d be able to put his hands around it, around this messy complicated thing that’s between them, that makes it feel like they have some kind of claim on each other in a way he’s pretty sure isn’t at all normal. But he can’t make himself move, can’t make himself do anything other than hold his breath and wait.
Finally Leslie speaks. “I thought we were real.”
Okay maybe, yeah, he’s obviously had more rum in that coke than he thought, or maybe she did, but either way he is completely lost, “Real? Wha-?”
“Like a real family. Like we didn’t just get to put together on paper or something, but we really belong, like no matter what happens with our parents or our lives or anything, I’m always going to have you, because you’re always going to be my brother.”
And there’s that word again, that hated, awful, awful word that she never gives the appropriate caveat, except this time it’s being accompanied by other words like ‘belong’ and ‘have you’ and ‘always’. And shit that’s so exactly how he feels about her, like she’s an essential piece of him that got broken off in some previous life and he didn’t work right until he found her again; like he cares more about the ‘having’ than the ‘how’; like they’re permanent and unbreakable and if her mother left his father tomorrow it wouldn’t change a single thing between them. And he doesn’t have a word for it, and he still doesn’t like the one she’s choosing, but if that’s what it means to her when she says it, well he’s having a hard time hating it quite so much.
A light goes on his head and he takes a step forward. “Is that why you never introduce me as your step-brother?”
She makes a face. “I hate that word.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. It just feels . . . artificial or temporary or something. Like you’re saying there’s that other person I happen to live with but have no obligation to care about, so whatever.”
“Yeah, but you know that’s not us, right? I mean you know that we-” and he doesn’t know how to tell her what they are, how he feels about her without ruining everything, winds up borrowing her original word, “Leslie we’re real. Whatever you call us, whatever word you use, we are absolutely real.”
“Promise?”
He reaches out and crooks his little finger around hers. “Pinkie swear.”
---
It turns out that Leslie’s insistence that he couldn’t drive had nothing to do with her feelings on Lindsay and everything to do with the fact they’ve both been drinking and she’s like the president of Students Against Drunk Driving program at her school (of course she is). And maybe Ben feels more than a little stupid for his earlier outburst when he finds this out but Leslie’s still got her little finger curled around his like she might never let go, so really he’s fine.
Since he wouldn’t want to do anything to turn her into a hypocrite (he’s got that part pretty much covered for both of them), they wind up leaving the car at the park and walking the half-mile home. Sneak in through the back and up the stairs, and when Leslie says a soft good night at her bedroom door, it really does feel a little bit like a date.
He turns to go into his room before he lets himself get carried away and does something stupid, when his name on Leslie’s lips calls him back, “Ben?”
“Yeah?”
“You know all those things you said about Mark? About how he should make me feel amazing and like I can conquer the world and I shouldn’t settle?”
“Yeah.”
“I know you don’t want me to say anything about Lindsay so I’m not. I won’t. But pretend I said all that same stuff to you. Pretend I said you were funny and smart and really kind, and Lindsay should think you’re wonderful, should make you feel like you can do anything. And if she doesn’t, she just- well she doesn’t deserve you, and you shouldn’t settle. Ben, please don’t settle.”
He turns to lean back against his door closing his eyes, trying to figure out how to explain that he can’t be with anyone who might actually think all those things about him. How to explain that settling is pretty much his only option, and at least with Lindsay he’s not compounding his sin by hurting someone else who might actually be stupid enough to make the mistake of caring about him. But of course there’s no way to say any of that to Leslie so he just stays quiet.
Leslie takes another step forward and slides her hand up over the scratches on the back of his neck like a grant of absolution.
“Just, you know, pretend I said all that.”
And then she’s gone.
---
( Part 3)
Pairing: Leslie/Ben (AU)
Word Count: ~5,100 (this part)
Rating: R? (Let's say R, there is a huge amount of swearing in this, and also sexual imagery)
Timeline: Highschool Alt!Universe (yeah you read that right)
Warnings: Um, they're recently acquired step-siblings, so you know that could be a little squicky (idek)
A/N: Yeah okay so this is still happening (I've decided I'm done apologizing for it), but before I get like twenty comments about Snapshots, I have significant plane and hotel room time next week all of which I plan to devote to cranking out the last part of that. Just give me a little bit of recovery from writing the previous part (because as much emotional hell as I put you guys through, I live with that for every day that I'm working on a part like that). So anyway on with this.
Part 1
Leslie’s warnings about Lindsay turn out to be kind of prophetic. Or maybe it’s just him, maybe he’s just so screwed up these days he can’t have a normal interaction with a girl who isn’t you know kind of related to him.
Regardless, he was never going to have a normal interaction with Lindsay Carlisle-Shay.
She obviously feels he’s beneath her, like she’s slumming it in some way, and seems to be taking great pleasure in deliberately being unable to remember his name. Seriously she calls him Dan like half the time.
And somehow they still wind up bringing each other off in one of the hotel bathrooms.
It’s angry and vicious, and she keeps calling him the wrong name, like that’s what she’s getting off on. That he knows he’s not really that important to her. And he wants to tell her to shut-up because her voice keeps distracting him from being able to pretend he’s not with her either. And when she reaches down to fumble with his zipper, and slip her hand into his pants, he puts his over her mouth just to keep her from talking for like five seconds.
She bites his fingers.
He attaches his mouth to side of her neck, high enough where she’ll never be able to cover the hickey, where everyone will know what she let him do. Runs his hand up the slit of her dress, and fingers her through the scrap of lace she’s wearing as underwear, taking a kind of perverse reciprocal pleasure in forcing her to finally say his name correctly before he brings her off.
When it’s done he feels dirty and hollow and like the worst kind of heel.
They pretty much ignore each other the rest of the night.
Still somehow he kind of thinks this isn’t going to be the last time this happens.
Because okay, maybe Lindsay is toxic. Maybe she’s a completely terrible person.
But Ben’s not really sure he deserves anything better.
Not when he was picturing Leslie in that blue dress the entire time.
---
When he gets home that night, he sneaks around the back because while he’s not past curfew or anything, he kind of doesn’t want to Leslie to see him right now, not when he’s pretty sure he’s got a few scratch marks on the back of his neck and a hickey just under his collar from someone she so obviously hates.
And yeah that’s probably a small part of the attraction of Lindsay. That she is decidedly not Leslie. That she’s like the anti-Leslie. Like if Leslie found out it would probably hurt her and maybe it would be good to know that him being with someone could hurt her in some way. Even if it’s for all the wrong reasons.
And maybe he’s a fucking asshole with serious issues.
Either way, the whole sneaking in to avoid Leslie thing winds up backfiring spectacularly.
She’s sitting in the backyard on her old childhood swingset, idly twisting this way and that. She’s still in her prom dress and there’s a break in the trees that seems to kind of spotlight her in the moonlight, and damn if the effect isn’t absolutely heart-stopping.
Which is probably why he quite literally stops. Dead in his tracks, holding his shoes in his hands like an idiot.
Leslie looks up and gives him an oddly sad smile. “Hey.”
“Umm, hey,” he blinks, bringing his hand to the back of his neck self-consciously. “You’re, um, back kind of early.”
“Yeah,” she exhales, droops, and she looks so impossibly fragile in that moment, like spun glass, sparkling and beautiful and far too delicate, that he just wants to hold her in his hands, protect her from the entire world.
Without really knowing what he’s doing or why he’s doing it, Ben walks over to stand behind her, hands coming to rest on the chain just above hers.
“Everything okay?”
She gives a kind of half-shrug that very clearly says no everything is not okay, but she’s not sure she wants to talk about it, at least not with him. Because he doesn’t know what to do for her, but he doesn’t know how to leave her like this either, he just gives her a tiny push, sending her forward and bringing her back to him.
Repeats it.
They just do that for a few minutes. She doesn’t actually ‘swing’ really. At least not the way he imagines Leslie must, throwing her whole body into it, pumping herself higher and higher in a giddy pendulum that makes you think she might take off at any minute. Instead she just kind of sits there, spent and tired, letting him do all the work, and every time she comes back to him he holds onto the chain a beat too long, interrupting the momentum, keeping her with him.
Finally on one of backswings, she moves her hands up to cover his, in a silent ‘stop’, and tilts her head back to look at him.
“I broke up with Mark tonight.”
That is about the last thing he expected to hear out of her mouth, because really the guy kind of screws with her head and Ben had pretty much resigned himself to the fact that it was going to take Mark breaking Leslie’s heart to get her out of that (either that or Ben committing some kind of heretofore undetermined felony, which you know he hadn’t entirely ruled out yet). And even if none of that were true, well Leslie is the kind of person who would just go out of her way not to do something like that to someone on their prom night.
So yeah complete and utter shock is about the only explanation he has for the fact his fingers automatically tangle up with hers around the chains of the swing, but Leslie doesn’t seem to mind, just tangles her fingers back and smiles that sad, heartbreaking smile that says she knows it’s going to be okay eventually, but right now everything just really sucks.
Finally he finds his voice, “So, um, what happened?”
Leslie looks away, digs the heel of her shoe into the dirt, “It’s kind of embarrassing to talk about. I mean you know like it might be weird.”
And she gives weird this significant emphasis, that immediately makes his brain go back to walking in on her and Mark and pronouncing it ‘weird’, and-
Shit.
He does not need to know this. But at the same time Ben can feel something insistent and black pounding at the back of his head, and he like three seconds from going over to Mark’s house and getting in at least one good punch before he gets put into traction, and he just- he can’t not know.
“Did he-? I mean he didn’t-?”
Yeah there is absolutely no way he’s going to be figuring out how to finish that sentence anytime soon.
Leslie shakes her head, “No, but I think we were going to, you know? Like I know he wanted to and I’d been thinking about it, about letting him-”
She doesn’t continue, but Ben knows what ‘letting him’ is referring to, every teenage guy in whole entire world knows what it means when a girl will ‘let you’ on the night of the prom. And surprisingly, even as he’s squeezing his eyes shut in an effort not to think about it, like at all, something weird happens. He’s not immediately assaulted with images of the things Leslie might have let Mark do or some kind of knife-blade jealously (though he can feel that lingering somewhere in the corner waiting to pounce), or really anything related to things Mark might have gotten that he’s totally forbidden.
Instead what overwhelms him, washes over him in a torrent so powerful that it pretty much obliterates everything else is just sadness. Complete, soul-crushing sadness at the idea that Leslie would ever think she should ‘let’ any guy do anything, that she needed to ‘let’ a guy do anything, that any guy shouldn’t be ecstatic to just, you know, be around her.
That some guy wouldn’t simply stand here with her in the moonlight, hands tangled up with hers on the chains of a swing-set and feel like his whole existence hinged on nothing more than being able to extend this moment as long as possible.
“Ben?” Leslie tugs a little on the chains, drawing his attention, “Ben? Oh, I grossed you out, didn’t I? Sorry.”
He shakes his head trying to clear it, wipe the slate clean. Finally, finds his voice. “No, no it’s okay. So you didn’t- No you just said you didn’t. So what stopped you from- ? Oh god, am I allowed to ask that?”
Leslie rolls her eyes, in her patented ‘sometimes you are so awkward it is completely painful to talk to you’, look, then squinches her face up in a glare. “You did.”
Wha-?
“You and everything you said about Mark and your stupid apology for everything you said about Mark. And you’re right okay? He doesn’t really talk to me and he doesn’t make me feel like I can conquer the world and whatever else it is you said a guy should do. And ugh,” She drops her head back against his hipbone, face stormy now, “This is all your fault, you know. I just wanted to have a nice fun night and instead I couldn’t stop thinking about everything you said and how Mark wasn’t any of it. And he noticed and we got into this big fight about why do I care what you think and I kept telling him that wasn’t the point at all. And you just- you ruined my prom.”
Yeah he should probably be apologizing or something, but honestly . . . Ben has never felt more awesome in his entire life.
She narrows her eyes. “Stop smiling.” Rattles the chains underneath his hands, “Seriously stop it. You’re not supposed to be happy about this. You’re supposed to be contrite and making it up to me.”
But her eyes are maybe kind of smiling, too. And he thinks maybe deep down she knows that if things had gone the other way it would have been ten-times worse, and yeah, she’s gonna be fine.
Still he does feel pretty bad that Leslie didn’t get the night she wanted, because Ben just wants to give her everything she wants, forever, and honestly his whole prom experience was nothing to write home about. Except for one very particular instance that he’s never going to write home about. And he doesn’t want that to be how he remembers this night and he can still hear Leslie’s pleading ‘Come with me, instead’ in his mind.
And ‘yeah,’ he thinks, ‘yeah Leslie, come with me, instead. It was awful because we were apart, because we should have been together and we both knew it. So come with me instead and it will be amazing.’
But of course he doesn’t say that, doesn’t say any of it, just untangles his hands from Leslie’s and puts hers deliberately back on the chains with a quiet “Wait here.”
Leslie doesn’t say anything, simply looks up at him with wide trusting eyes, and an excited little-girl smile that says she knows he has an idea, and she believes in him enough to be patient and wait (and really if you’ve ever tried to get Leslie to be patient about anything you know this level of trust is like one step away from knighthood, from being declared her champion or something).
So Ben puts his shoes on the ground and sneaks into the house barefoot, to brave the sleeping dragon of their parents (sometimes there are serious advantages to being the responsible children), and go questing for something appropriately alcoholic and festive that will still satisfy Leslie’s sweet tooth (because even he knows it is not a successful prom after-party without booze). Finally he settles on the half full bottle of rum they keep on the back top shelf for cooking (again ridiculously responsible kids here), grabs a couple of cans of soda out of the fridge, and tosses them all in a bag. Goes to head back outside and then pauses, contemplating.
Fuck it.
Turning on his heel he makes his way upstairs and invades Leslie’s room, grabbing her tiara from the spot where it always hangs off her lampshade
If he’s gonna be a knight tonight, he damn well needs a queen.
---
When he gets back outside, Leslie’s eyes immediately fix on his relieved and excited and maybe a little bit fearful, like he really did just go off to fight a dragon for her and she’s been waiting on the edge of her seat to see if he returned safely.
Without a word, Ben walks over to stand in front of her, sets the tiara on her head with all the import and solemnity of a real coronation. And in a way it kind of feels like it, like he’s giving her back her power, returning Queen Leslie, confident, kickass, tiara-wearing scourge of black-hearted step-brothers everywhere to her rightful place. And okay maybe this metaphor/fantasy is getting a little out of control, but Leslie lifts her hands to touch the cheap rhinestones with a smile so bright it makes him feel like he’s given her diamonds, and he honestly doesn’t give a damn.
He grabs the sack of rum and cokes off the ground and jingles his car keys.
“Come with me.”
“Where?”
“Wherever you want.”
---
Where Leslie wants turns out to be only half a mile away at the Ramsett Park playground. And Ben would tell you he was surprised by this, except honestly, he’s kind of not. Thinks it’s kind of perfect actually.
In a playground everything is uncomplicated, and happiness is as simple as a set of monkey-bars or a see-saw. In a playground everything is pretend and anything can be what you want it to be. In a playground the rules are made up as you go along and the only ‘can’t’s are the ones you choose.
So yeah, if Ben Wyatt wants to take Leslie Knope to a prom of their very own?
Well if it could happen anywhere, it could happen in a playground.
The alcohol is forgotten almost immediately for the simple, dizzy pleasure of the merry-go-round. Leslie tries to get it going herself, but the shoes she’s wearing aren’t conducive to this, so Ben stands her up on the platform and tells her to hold on and runs. Keeps running and slipping and running some more. Round and round until he’s got it going as fast as he possibly can and Leslie’s laughing and screaming in delight and yelling ‘Get on Ben. Get on,’ and finally he scrambles onto the other side to keep it balanced.
And they go.
They go spinning so fast it feels like they might fly off the world, and Ben’s crouched down and holding on with both hands, but Leslie, amazing, confident, do-anything Leslie is still standing upright, thighs braced against either bar for balance, and damn if she doesn’t look less like a queen and more like some terribly wonderful, all-powerful goddess at that moment.
Either way when everything finally slows down and the world stops spinning and they’re both laughing and out of breath and leaning back against the middle pole for support, and Ben is just starting to think he probably shouldn’t repeat that or he might wind up breaking his neck, Leslie looks down at him with bright, gleeful eyes and whispers “Let’s do it again” and it doesn’t matter if she’s a deity or a queen or simply Leslie who lives down the hall, he’s powerless to refuse.
---
They don’t actually get around to the alcoholic part of the festivities until maybe two or three in the morning. After they’ve exhausted nearly every option the playground has, decimated their clothing climbing up rope ladders, and playing on the see-saws and racing the swings. Until they’re tired and happy and everything that happened before they came here seems long ago and far away.
But you know, they’re still teenagers and it’s still their prom-night, and he’s pretty sure that there’s a rule somewhere in the adolescent handbook that says if you are able to somehow acquire alcohol on the night of your prom you must consume said alcohol. And he and Leslie are nothing if not devoted followers of all rules, guidelines, bylaws etc.
So they sit up on the platform at the top of the slide, legs dangling over the edge, passing the rum bottle back and forth to pour it into their now only mildly cold cans of coke.
It doesn’t matter that much, they’re really mostly going through the motions because it gives them an excuse to sit together in the moonlight and talk about things with a fraction more honesty than you’re allowed sober.
And maybe Ben’s doing it because the platform is small and Leslie’s pressed right up against his side, thigh to thigh, hip to hip, shoulder to shoulder and he is for once just letting himself enjoy the sensation of being this close to her and it must be the intoxication keeping the guilt at bay.
Leslie sighs contentedly and drops her head to his shoulder, causing her tiara to skew at a dangerous angle. Idly, Ben rescues it before it can plunge to the ground, hands it over to her.
She takes it and sets it to the side, with a quiet, “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.” He whispers back, trying to make her understand that he knows this isn’t about saving twenty-five dollars worth of rhinestones at all.
“I’m sorry I made you walk home from the flower shop last week. And I’m sorry you got lost doing it.”
Ben chuckles under his breath a little, because now that he’s not, you know, actually in the middle of it, the memory of discovering first hand Pawnee has an actual gay bar when he stumbled in to the Bulge to ask for directions, is honestly kind of funny.
“Yeah well, I’m choosing to think of it like a tour. Besides, I probably kind of deserved it.”
“You didn’t.” She says lifting her head and trying to kind of half turn to look at him, as she does. But it really is tight up here so the effect is that her face is suddenly very close to his, and for a split-second, just a split-second he lets himself wonder what she would do if he kissed her right now, like momentarily indulge the notion that she might give him some other response than pushing him down the slide head first.
Turns his head away, and gulps down a couple of quick swallows of his rum and coke, because he is still way too sober to have an excuse for these thoughts. Lets himself feel the slight burn of it down his esophagus that tells him it’s now officially reached the point where it’s more rum than coke, takes another hit, and then hisses and shakes his head, “Really, let’s just forget about it.”
But once Leslie has decided to do something, nothing is going to stop her, and apparently right now she has decided to apologize whether he wants her to or not.
“I know you wouldn’t have said what you did about Mark if I hadn’t gotten so upset about Lindsay.”
At the mention of Lindsay’s name Ben turns his head away because he can still feel the other girl’s nails on the back of his neck, and her teeth on his fingers as her hand worked him to meaningless completion and he just- he can’t be remembering that and still keep looking at Leslie. He feels like he’s betrayed her in some fundamental way and he doesn’t even know if it’s what he did or why he did it or the fact that he’s still not entirely certain he won’t wind up doing it again.
This entire time Leslie keeps talking, keeps explaining like she’s the one in the wrong here, “I just- I know what she’s like and I don’t know, the thought that you actually liked her it just-”
And Ben hasn’t really been registering what she was saying until she abruptly breaks off, and he’s about to turn around to give her some non-committal response about how it’s not a big deal, when he feels her fingertips at the back of his neck, and for second his brain short-circuits.
“Oh.” She says it with a quiet disappointment, as her nail traces the edge of something and he realizes she’s not so much touching him as examining someone else’s handiwork.
Without thinking his hand flies up to stop her, gripping her fingers too-hard. “Leslie-”
She jerks away. “No, don’t. I, um, I don’t- I guess I just assumed that you and she didn’t- Which is like totally stupid because you didn’t say anything about how your night was. But I guess it was better mine.”
The last few words come out twisted, ugly and scathing and nothing like the Leslie he knows.
And he wants to tell her it wasn’t, wants to tell her it wasn’t like that at all, that it was awful and meaningless, and so incredibly not about Lindsay it’s not even funny, But he kind of thinks that would just make her more upset. Like she could get past him actually liking someone she despised, but using them, using anyone like that, even Lindsay Carlisle-Shay, . . . that’s just something Leslie would never forgive.
The fact that Lindsay was definitely using him too, is completely unimportant, Leslie already hates her and he thinks it’s things like this that are part of the reason.
So instead he just drops his head to his hand, and mutters, “Leslie, just let it go.”
And there must be something in his voice or his body language, something that warns her off, turns her back, some that says she’s about to go off the map of their relationship into dangerous uncharted territory and ‘here there be monsters,’ because for the first time since he met her, Leslie backs down.
Still it’s not the same after that. There’s a weird angry tension in the air. And he knows Leslie’s pissed at him for “liking” Lindsay or whatever it is he’s going to decide to call it, and he’s pissed at her for acting like she should get some kind of say in this, and he’s pissed at himself because there’s a part of him that wanted this to happen, wanted her to know just to see what it did to her, and really how stupidly self-destructive can he get?
But he’s also pissed at her because now that it has happened he honestly can’t figure out whether her whole issue is more about him being a with a girl or about it being Lindsay, but he’s pretty sure it’s the later when he wants it to be the former.
Finally because he just can’t stand it anymore, he finishes off the remaining contents of his soda can (which is now almost entirely rum), climbs down off the tower, and gathers things up.
Grabs his car keys and start to head over to where he’d parked not even stopping to make sure Leslie is following.
“Ben.”
He turns on his heel to glare at her, “What?”
“You can’t drive.”
Dammit not this again. “Look I’m not apologizing to you about this and I’m not letting you strand me here, too. I shouldn’t have said anything about Mark okay. But that doesn’t mean you get to have some kind of say over who I date now. I’ll do or not do whatever I want with Lindsay, and you want to tell me all about what a terrible person she is, fine. But don’t act like you have a right to be angry at me about this because you don’t, you’re not my-”
He breaks off just in time, bites down hard on the word ‘girlfriend’ before it can spill from his lips. Takes a shaky breath.
Except Leslie’s pissed now, crosses her arms over her chest to glare at him, “What? I’m not your what?”
“Nothing. You’re just my step-sister, okay? That’s it, just my step-sister.”
And maybe it comes out a little harder and more bitter than it should, because fuck if that doesn’t hurt to say. But that’s his issue not hers, so he doesn’t really understand why Leslie is standing there staring at him like he’s slapped her.
“I thought we were more than that. I thought-”
“What? What did you think we were? Because honestly, sometimes I don’t know.”
Shit, did he really just say that? How much of that rum did he have?
Still Leslie doesn’t immediately recoil or freak out or anything, instead she just looks at him and it feels like they’re so close to something, like if only he could reach out, he’d be able to put his hands around it, around this messy complicated thing that’s between them, that makes it feel like they have some kind of claim on each other in a way he’s pretty sure isn’t at all normal. But he can’t make himself move, can’t make himself do anything other than hold his breath and wait.
Finally Leslie speaks. “I thought we were real.”
Okay maybe, yeah, he’s obviously had more rum in that coke than he thought, or maybe she did, but either way he is completely lost, “Real? Wha-?”
“Like a real family. Like we didn’t just get to put together on paper or something, but we really belong, like no matter what happens with our parents or our lives or anything, I’m always going to have you, because you’re always going to be my brother.”
And there’s that word again, that hated, awful, awful word that she never gives the appropriate caveat, except this time it’s being accompanied by other words like ‘belong’ and ‘have you’ and ‘always’. And shit that’s so exactly how he feels about her, like she’s an essential piece of him that got broken off in some previous life and he didn’t work right until he found her again; like he cares more about the ‘having’ than the ‘how’; like they’re permanent and unbreakable and if her mother left his father tomorrow it wouldn’t change a single thing between them. And he doesn’t have a word for it, and he still doesn’t like the one she’s choosing, but if that’s what it means to her when she says it, well he’s having a hard time hating it quite so much.
A light goes on his head and he takes a step forward. “Is that why you never introduce me as your step-brother?”
She makes a face. “I hate that word.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. It just feels . . . artificial or temporary or something. Like you’re saying there’s that other person I happen to live with but have no obligation to care about, so whatever.”
“Yeah, but you know that’s not us, right? I mean you know that we-” and he doesn’t know how to tell her what they are, how he feels about her without ruining everything, winds up borrowing her original word, “Leslie we’re real. Whatever you call us, whatever word you use, we are absolutely real.”
“Promise?”
He reaches out and crooks his little finger around hers. “Pinkie swear.”
---
It turns out that Leslie’s insistence that he couldn’t drive had nothing to do with her feelings on Lindsay and everything to do with the fact they’ve both been drinking and she’s like the president of Students Against Drunk Driving program at her school (of course she is). And maybe Ben feels more than a little stupid for his earlier outburst when he finds this out but Leslie’s still got her little finger curled around his like she might never let go, so really he’s fine.
Since he wouldn’t want to do anything to turn her into a hypocrite (he’s got that part pretty much covered for both of them), they wind up leaving the car at the park and walking the half-mile home. Sneak in through the back and up the stairs, and when Leslie says a soft good night at her bedroom door, it really does feel a little bit like a date.
He turns to go into his room before he lets himself get carried away and does something stupid, when his name on Leslie’s lips calls him back, “Ben?”
“Yeah?”
“You know all those things you said about Mark? About how he should make me feel amazing and like I can conquer the world and I shouldn’t settle?”
“Yeah.”
“I know you don’t want me to say anything about Lindsay so I’m not. I won’t. But pretend I said all that same stuff to you. Pretend I said you were funny and smart and really kind, and Lindsay should think you’re wonderful, should make you feel like you can do anything. And if she doesn’t, she just- well she doesn’t deserve you, and you shouldn’t settle. Ben, please don’t settle.”
He turns to lean back against his door closing his eyes, trying to figure out how to explain that he can’t be with anyone who might actually think all those things about him. How to explain that settling is pretty much his only option, and at least with Lindsay he’s not compounding his sin by hurting someone else who might actually be stupid enough to make the mistake of caring about him. But of course there’s no way to say any of that to Leslie so he just stays quiet.
Leslie takes another step forward and slides her hand up over the scratches on the back of his neck like a grant of absolution.
“Just, you know, pretend I said all that.”
And then she’s gone.
---
( Part 3)